An Alliance raid group (lower right) gets set to take on the Sha of Anger

When I first saw the Sha of Anger while questing in Kun-Lai Summit I boggled at the scale of it. And I love the Sha model. The art people did a killer job everywhere you look this expansion. It must’ve been fun!

I ran Direbrew. For trinkets. I ran it a time or two each day at first. In past years you’d run it a few times, the trinket you wanted would drop, everything would be peachy. On Friday I started getting worried. I ran it five times. Nothing. I got pretty tired of seeing the tanking trinkets drop over and over.

Saturday I ran it five more times. I was starting to get annoyed that the RNG was going to keep me from having the ilevel needed to do LFR the next week. (My guild’s not yet ready to start MoP raids together.) I’d spent an absurd amount of time leveling and grinding gear and rep since the launch–I’d done all this tedious stuff only to get barred from the part of the game I actually like by the RNG? Really?

If you’re keeping track, I’ve now run it about 20 times. Sunday I got up and queued and–the healer trinket dropped.

I wish I had been happy, but it was more like my disappointment with the game abated. I agree with Blizzard that randomness in loot is more exciting but actual randomness is sometimes going to screw people over and leave them with no option but to be bad at the game. My rogues have been ridiculously unlucky at getting weapons. I like the class, but I have no choice but to be awful at it. Liar’s Tongue? Never dropped. Heroic ICC axes? Hunter weapons. Steelbender’s Masterpiece? Druid took it the one time my rogue saw it drop. Trickster’s Edge? Only dropped when I was on my casters. No-Kaled? Never won a roll.

So after I got the healer trinket, I switched specs and queued as DPS to try for the DPS caster trinket. And the healer trinket dropped again. And again. And again. Five times that day.

Remember when the profanity filter kept getting switched back on?
Remember getting tired of going to turn it off every session?
Remember eventually just leaving it on? No? Well, well that’s what I did. It amuses me to see all the special characters and mentally read them as, e.g., “I’ll punctuate your punctuation up.”Continue reading →

Jeez, Pandaria is gorgeous. I do not enjoy leveling grinds, but even on release night when I was miserable competing for quest mobx I kept seeing new stuff and thinking “amg, so amazing!”

And that’s just how it looks. The way it plays is…not terrible? I’m not a person who enjoys leveling for its own sake. I want to be at level cap and do the endgame things so I don’t expect that many people will share my opinion. But having said that, I do enjoy quests that tell stories and fill in the lore behind all this new strangeness. I had this urge to go back and quest in some of the areas that I skipped, but hey, the alts will get there soon enough. Continue reading →